Thursday, April 21, 2011

Copper earth rod pictures

Here you can see a few pictures of electrical earth rods inside inspection chambers. These are all copper-jacketed steel rods with 16mm diameter.
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Picture 1 – An earthing rod installed inside a precast concrete inspection chamber


The earthing system at this project was not yet completed at this point time.

However, the project was nearing the end of the construction period. Since this earth rod inspection chamber was by the side of a service road near the plant-room area, the installation of the rod and chamber needed to wait until the road crusher run has been laid.

This is to make sure that the chamber can be properly set to the finish level of the road.

Here the rod and chamber were already in place, just waiting for the final tar coating.

Picture 2 – A close up view to show the exothermic welding of the earth rod to the earthing PVC copper cable


Here I zoomed in a little bit into the earlier picture to show the type of bonding between the copper-jacketed earth rod and the copper earthing cable.

I personally always prefer that this connection is done using a suitable type of compression clamp.

However, this particular client has made it a rule that in all their building projects, the connections between earthing conductors and the earth rods must be done using a permanent bonding method such as the exothermic welding here.

This particular client was a very large organization who has to maintain many installations throughout the country. So I assumed that they were having some concern about the alertness of some of their maintenance teams on the ground to this aspect of safety.

If the concern was real, I would definitely agree with a permanent bonding like this. In this way there was minimal risk of quality at the connection being degraded over time.

Of course if there is a need to make an additional connection here in future for some reasons, then the task will be a bit difficult. But it can still be done although not in a very proper way.

Picture 3 – Connection of earth rod to earth cable using compression clamp



Here is an example of the connection using brass compression clamp. I had the contractor used this method first to try to persuade the client accept it. But they didn’t.

Picture 4 – A closer view of the compression clamp connection


Well, the workmanship of this connection could be much better. But since permanent bonding was insisted, the connection was changed to the exothermic type.

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